PartyPoker Million Cruise

I just spent 7 days completely offline for the first time since I've had a computer. I must say that it was completely refreshing and I didn't even have the urge to go online because I was enjoying myself so much on the cruise. There was just always something to do and though I won't be able to write about all of it, I do want to jot down a few things accompanied by random photos from throughout the week.

One of many reasons for not being in my room or online: sunset

The $8k Main Event started off well for me. I had a pretty good table despite having Bond18 and Benjo at my table. A couple guys from Ukraine with very unorthodox playing styles kept the table active and flowing with loose chips. I got my hands on a few of them in several different pots but nothing too significant. At the end of the day I had doubled my starting stack from 10k to 20k. Day2 did not last long for me, though. After losing some sizeable pots I had 7k left with blinds of 250/500, Adrian Koy raised in MP, I pushed AJo from the button and the BB reshoved over the top with AKs. The flop was 5K5 and I was toast.

Day1 in the Main Event, a rare smile at the poker table

With the Main Event out of the way I had plenty of time for drinking and a few excursions as the ship made stops along the way. The first time I went offboard was in Izmir, Turkey, where several of us took a couple "horse taxis" to the local bazar in a mission to buy ping-pong paddles and balls.

It was semifrightening when the cars honked/buzzed past and our driver refused to check if the lane was free before switching lanes. An accident is basically GG for the horse and passengers so I'm surprised he was so careless.

At a local restaurant in Istanbul. Great service, great atmosphere, not so great food

Alex and Julia at the restaurant in Istanbul

I really enjoyed Istanbul the next day, though the weather was not that great. Croatia, specifically Dubrovnik, took the prize for best stop though. A truly awesome city with an amazing view and crystal clear water, wow.

Group photo in Istanbul: (l.t.r.) Flo, Alex, Mirijam, Benny, Tim, Seb, yours truly, Benjo, David and Chris

Dubrovnik, it was awesome to say the least

I did play a fair amount of live cash game on the cruise, much to my surprise. I've written several times how boring full-ring live cash games can be, but little did I know that our Russian friends from Vienna would be there playing every night so I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I lost by biggest live pot but I also won my biggest live pot ever and I did manage to make some money against them overall so that was good news.

For the last night of the cruise I decided to bust out my suit if Mirijam wore her golden cocktail dress, so we each held our promise and celebrated Alex's win in the disco. It was disappointingly empty, but one drunk Russian kid provided plenty of entertainment on the dance floor.

Looking spiffy

Congrats again to Alex Jung for taking down the Main Event!

Our last day we spent hanging around in Venice just enjoying the last rays of sun and eating a nice original Venetian pizza. Yum. I would be lying if I said I didn't completely enjoy the vacation, though it wasn't a complete vacation because I still did play plenty of poker. Hopefully PartyPoker will organize this again next year because having an active poker room on a ship definitely adds a nice spin to a cruise. If not, I probably won't go on a cruise for a while because 90% of the crowd was over 60 years old and they aren't very much fun to party with :)

Now it's a matter of a 3-week countdown until I fly to Vegas for the WSOP on June 3rd. In the meantime I need to find a new laptop that can support a 30" monitor. That basically means I need a graphic card with dual link DVI, if anyone has any suggestions please drop off a comment!
*Edit: $50 reward on Stars or FTP if you can find me a nice laptop that meets my qualifications:
-dual link dvi
-either 15.4" or 17" display
-not too loud and does not get too hot
-I do not want a Mac

gogogogogogo!

Just for the record

I did manage to make up all my March losses in April. A good feeling for sure.

Now I have to pack my suitcase (yet again) to catch the earlybird flight to Venice to start the cruise tomorrow.

Shipitonetimeplzkthxbye.

They see me grindin'

I'm pretty proud of myself for finally getting a backup internet connection last week. Every once in a while my DSL goes out and I am immediately disconnected from all my tables with no chance of reconnection. Apparently BossMedia are too incompetent to program a reconnection function that actually works. Anyway, those issues should be solved now as I have two connections running simultaneously. For anyone interested, this is what I got.

Grinding itself has been going surprisingly well and I tried to save some interesting HHs from the past days. In no particular order:

My line looks like it doesn't have an ace in it so I can understand why he changed his hand into a bluff, because he certainly could not have been expecting to be called by worse

His turn donkbet confused me but I went with my gut here. I guess he had some kind of diamond draw, but I was not anticipating to win the pot when I saw the river

I was pretty sure he didn't want to play for stacks (200bb) with most of his range here, and I can easily have a random 5 in my 4bet bluffing range so I thought there was a good chance I could push him off his hand

You didn't think I was only going to post winners, did you? :)

I throw a good beat on someone after playing my draw pretty aggro here. He was not thrilled with me after this hand.

This opponent seemed somewhat tilted at the time after I just stacked him at another table. I really dislike his play for 150bb here because he is never ahead and could easily be drawing dead.

Strange line for queens but whatever floats your boat

Time for another good beat, this time I hit one of my 9 outs and dodge a heart for the win. My opponent apparently "thought I was solid but was mistaken"

Nuts no good. Can't blame him for his play, though

I wouldn't advocate 3betting 93s but if you do I would recommend flopping like this

Pretty nasty river but a pretty good situation for me if I can get him stacking with 44 here

Alright that's enough hands for now. Because Hans Martin Vogl was here over the weekend I now have the new weight loss updates for all 3 of my horses:
Hans - currently 85kg, needs to hit 80kg by July. I'd estimate an 80% chance he makes it, though he did scarf down 5 Dunkin Donuts in one sitting while he was here
Stefan - currently 99kg, needs to hit 90kg by July. 50% chance
Seb - currently 95kg, needs to hit 85.5kg by July. 10% chance

1 week until the cruise, woohoo!

Booyakasha

I was happy to leave Monte Carlo, though I definitely had a great time while I was there. Luck games treated me well for the most part, though I did donk off €3k in a 1-2nl home game we started with Max, Chris, Flo, Seb and myself. Other than that, I went 1 for 2 in food eating prop bets because Tobi thought he could 3 meals in 30 minutes (he finished 1 and a half meals). The other one was when Seb, Max and I went out eating and we were all stuffed after a full 3 course meal. We challenged Max to finish all 3 desserts (3/4 banana split, 1/2 fruit bowl and the other half of his banana split) and to my surprise he came through like a champion. Needless to say, he wasn't feeling too well afterwards.

I now have two weeks before I fly to Venice on the 2nd of May. The PartyPoker cruise sets sail in Venice and will make stops in Bari, Olympia/Katakolon, Izmir, Istanbul and Dubronik. I'm especially looking forward to the stops in Greece and Croatia, hopefully they'll allow us enough time to do some exploring. I'm pretty sure the cruise is going to be an amazing time to say the least.

Until then I'm just going to grind. I've decided to leave NL5k out of my routine until I recover fully from the €30k I lost in March, so until then I'm sticking with NL1k and NL2k. Hopefully it won't take me too long because it really hurts to see how soft 5k games can be at times, but I really want to stay strong about this.

I don't have too many interesting hands (I've only played 12k hands so far in April) but I'll try and save some over the next few days and get them posted. This one was my own fault for slowplaying, but I was still pretty shocked when the cards were flipped :)

My camera died in MC and I forgot to take many pictures in San Remo, so I'll just post the views I had from each of the hotel rooms.

San Remo

Monte Carlo

Update from Monte Carlo

I spent Saturday (Day 1a) hanging out doing nothing except playing Fifa 08 on the PS3 that Pokerstars had set up in their players lounge. The first game I played against an American who wanted to play me for money, so I beat him 3-0 and the second game he preferred to play for no money :) Then Chris Moneymaker came over and wanted to play me so I gave him a 2-0 beating with him having 0 shots the whole game. Ship it.

Day 1b was yesterday and I busted out in level 5 (150/300) after getting it all in with AK vs 88 in a button vs big-blind situation for 11.5k. The road up to that point was a wild up-and-down as always. I had a really sick table after the 1st hour, as I was sandwiched inbetween Dario Alioto two seats to my right, Max Pescatori to my immediate right, Marc Goodwin to my immediate left, Gus Hansen two to my left and Antonio Esfandiari three to my left. The last thing I wanted to do was get into too many pots with these guys, especially against Gus or Antonio when I was out of position, but because we played so long some situations were inevitable.

I made a nice fold against Gus after I raised QQ UTG and he 3bet me, which I called. I check/called the 943 flop and check/folded the 6 on the turn. He had a set, which he didn't show but I later read in his blog ;) In a later hand I flopped a flush against Esfandiari after defending my BB with 76s. I got two streets of value from him after he called the flop & turn but folded the river.

I escaped that table and was moved to a new table with Isaac "WestmenloAA" Baron to my immediate left. I had around 20k at this point but lost 8k after firing a couple barrels with AK on a missed flop. Then came the aforementioned hand with AK vs 88 where I got it all-in preflop and lost the flip.

And so ends a very disappointing EPT season for me. I played 7 tournaments and cashed only once for slightly over €10k. I'm not disappointed with the way I played, though, as I feel I made pretty good decisions throughout most tournaments. The large field tournaments are really high-variance so not much can be said after just 7 tournaments, so that's not really what I'm worried about. The fact of the matter is that I had a lot of fun, got to travel to a ton of cities and will certainly be back next season with better results.

I'm now going to forget my troubles and devour a €25 cheeseburger from room service. I'll add a €10 chocolate mousse to that and wash it down with an €8 bottle of Evian. This place is a pretty big ripoff, but food options are limited so I have no choice.

Monte Carlo baby

My few days off in Berlin were nice, believe it or not I actually won online! Yesterday we flew from Berlin -> Zurich and then Zurich -> Monte Carlo. Originally it was just me, Chris Niesert, Tobi Reinkemeier and Flo Langmann but at Tegel we ended up bumping into Johannes Strassmann and Freddy Keitel. Unfortunately our seats were spread all throughout the airplane so we couldn't get any group chinese game going. I played Chris HU and won a little bit, which certainly made the flight go by faster.

After arriving in Monte Carlo we all went out to eat at a local Italian restaurant "Gianni." Katja Thater, Jan von Halle, Sebastian Ruthenberg, Benjamin Kang, Max Bracht and Daniel Zink joined us so we were a pretty big group! The food was excellent, the coversation was all about poker (what else?).

After I registered for the Main Event (playing Day 1b) a few of us decided to join a €1090 SNG, where there are 10 players and winner takes all (Main Event seat or cash). To make a long story short: After capturing the early chip lead, I then lost everything except 1BB only to make a full recovery and then chop 50/50 with a pretty weak Italian player when the chipcount was 13.5k for him and 11.5k for me HU. I got €5300 for my efforts, not a bad start.

Today's plan is basically to chill (remind me to post pictures of the hotel/view/Monte Carlo when I'm back in Berlin) and get my head clear for a long day tomorrow. One time Monte Carlo!!!

EPT San Remo Day 2

I pushed my 8.9k chips all-in the very first hand of Day 2 with K4o on the button and gathered the blinds + antes. A few hands later I did it again with A9o and gathered them again. Now I had 13.3k and someone in EP raised to 3k. I shoved on him with QQ and he tanked before finally calling with 77. The board came down 56842 and I was kicked out, which is a shame because that was a 30k pot and I would have had a playable stack had I won it.

I fly back home on Saturday, so I have today and tomorrow to just hang around San Remo. Then I need to take care of some things in Berlin before flying to Monte Carlo on April 11th. It's about time that I cash in one of these things again...